San Diego poet Ben Doller’s latest poetry title is FAUXHAWK (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015). The
author of the poetry collections Dead Ahead(Louisiana State University Press, 2001), FAQ(Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2009) and Radio, Radio (Albany NY: Fence Books, 2010), as well as two
collaborations, the poems in FAUXHAWKutilize an energized, and
nearly manic, sense of play through erasure, repetition, exaltation, the
footnote, lyric fragment and collage, as well as some of the most lively and
gymnastic turns I’ve seen in a very long time. The collection is constructed
with an opening, seemingly self-titled section of shorter poems before moving
into shorter poem-sections: “Earing,” “Hello,” “Pain” and “Google Drive.” Part
of what appeals about this collection is seeing the ways in which Doller is,
with such a lively glee and a fierce intelligence, stretching out the
boundaries of his own poetic, from the staccato-accumulations of a poem such as
“[BEE]” (“I background my ground. / I backlist my list. // I backtalk my talk.
/ I backwash my wash.”), the erasure/excisions of the poem-section “PAIN”(“Consider
thee carefully / what thou taketh for pain”), to underscoring the overwhelming
footnotes of the poem “HELLO,” a short lyric poem awash with forty-six
different footnotes, the first of which reads:

Hello: The poem
functions in the book as a phatic and in media res greeting as well as a
belated introduction to certain poetic effects and themesthat are
mobilized throughout the material. “Hello” is an Americanized compromise
selected over the course of millennia from a multiplicity of alternatives:
“holla” (stop, cease), “halon,” “holon” (to fetch), andmany more, hunting
hollers (“halloo!”) and hailings. Each term conveys more a sense of
pulling another into one’s sphere than an act of politesse or
acknowledgement, an interruption or imperative as opposed to an introduction.
Hail Caesar. Sieg Heil. Hey Girl. Halt your motion and attend to your
addresser. Not until Edison successfully lobbied that the word be used as
a greeting for telephone calls, a way to acknowledge the scratchy silence
about to be breached, ws the term standardized. The telephone was
originally envisioned as an open line between two offices, and a bell was
originally proposed as a way to initiate a conversation until Edison’s
suggestion (“I don’t think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be
heard 10 to 20 feet away. What do you think?). Another Bell, Alexander
Graham, who is credited with the invention of the telephone, but who
appropriated much of the vital technology (including a liquid transmitter)
from one Elisha Gray, argued for “Ahoy!”

The
poem, “[BEE],” also, becomes a poem that, rhythmically, would be quite
wonderful to hear aloud, and the sounds and rhythms that run through the breaks
and collisions of Doller’s poems are quite striking. In FAUXHAWK, Doller articulates and explores the difficulties with
language, and how language is so often misued and misappropriated, in an
exacting and glorious music, and creating a fine and precise tension between
drudgery and song. As he writes to open the poem “DUMMY”:

Isn’t it dumb

to write a

letter

at a time.

“On
Google Drive,” he writes, in the sequence/section “Google Drive,” “the
eucalyptus trees / sing Philip Levine // behind the Korean / bakesales.” The
sequence/section plays off of a form of poetic translation, opening with a
quote by American poet Fanny Howe, who is referenced throughout the sequence: “I’m
rewriting Fanny’s book probably a gift for a friend / Or from her file I stole
it from the faculty lounge.” The sequence reads as a curious blend of possible
translation and poetic response to Howe’s poetry, from the cadence to the
ghazal-like fragments and connections between them, and his coy references to
the strong undercurrent of Catholic faith that runs throughout her poetry. “Unlike
myself,” he writes, “you are immune to cliché. / Yours is faith to write what
you say // myself, I can’t always tell when I’m joking / and I pop out of bed
plotting paths to get loaded.”

In
the notes at the end of the collection, Doller informs that “‘Google Drive’ is
a word-by-word writing-through of Fanny Howe’s ‘Robeson Street,’ from the book of the same title, published in 1985 by Alice James Books. The line ‘Schizophrenia
is hearing voices, not doing them’ belongs to the comedian Maria Bamford.” Still,
each referenced link to Howe’s writing throughout the sequence reads as both
link and deflection, which could easily be a matter of Dollar utilizing Howe’s
language, but not necessarily similar intentions, somehow allowing him
opportunities to slip his own poem underneath the structure of what is a
variation upon hers: